Jim is the the director of communications at The Heartland Institute. Prior to joining Heartland, he was an ink-stained newspaperman for 16 years with many stops in "old media."

Jim covered Congress and The White House during the George W. Bush administration for The Washington Times, and worked as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist for newspapers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and California. He has appeared on the Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, and many local and national talk radio shows to talk politics and policy.

Murphy points to the profanity-laden rant by Al Gore at a global warming conference in Aspen, and sees in the rage the defeat of climate alarmism — or at least what appears to be a tacit acknowledgement from the Grand Poobah of warmists that his life’s work is going up in a cloud of non-harmful CO2.

First, to Gore’s rant — because if you haven’t heard it, you’re missing a seminal moment in the climate debate. This was ManBearPig addressing a friendly audience of fellow climate alarmists:

Reality has now caught up with the South Park parody of Gore, so it’s no wonder he’s swearin’ mad. Writes Murphy:

For those who have a wish to hear the grating sound of a man distempered and frustrated that the cause for which he has given at least a decade of his time, the “greatest moral challenge of our time,” is lost … Can a person win the Nobel Peace prize twice? I surely hope so, for this is the E=mc² moment of our green time.

It is not a pretty display. The question the sorry little rant calls up is whether, in its way, this temper fit was a signal that the great global warming crusade, that has had such a sweet run for the last decade or more, is finally over. Has it run, so to speak, out of gas?

Murphy then details how the green agenda is either politically dead in most of the West, or politically ignored. Canada has turned away, and is now getting miffed that the Obama administration keeps holding up approval of a pipeline to bring the product of its vast oil sands to the refineries of the United States.

And where is Obama himself? He just toured the Midwest in a caravan of $2 million luxury buses and escorts with nary a worry about his carbon footprint. The man who infamously boasted of going down in history for healing the planet and making the oceans recede barely even talks about (phony) green jobs on the stump anymore. Cap’n Trade is dead in Congress, and the American public is increasingly skeptical of the message of the climate scare-mongers. The only green avenue the enviro-left will pursue are those by executive fiat, such as Obama’s EPA. The green movement, in short, is no longer a winning public policy issue — though the media still treat it as such, and absurdly try to slay presidential candidates for daring to question what they’ve been pushing as an article of faith (not science) for decades.

Murphy, again, sums up the sad state of affairs for the green movement — and why Gore’s rant matters:

… Perhaps, finally, the unctuousness, sanctimony and sputtering righteousness of the high-profile environmentalists signal to most observers that they aren’t really as certain of all this “science” as they pretend to be. Either way this long green game has lost its fundamental energies. The celebrities will find another wristband; the politicians will find a new vague distraction.

We can only hope that the next cause célèbre the left inflicts on our society is relatively harmless (awareness of some fashionable disease) or even useful (the plight of Tibet) — and not something akin to the mindless, obsessive, freedom-crushing fraud that is global warming.

Al Gore’s Aspen Rant: The Latest Sign the Climate Alarmists Are Losing was last modified: August 20th, 2011 by Jim Lakely